Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

(A New York Times Notable Book of 2013) The Arab Revolt against the Ottomans in World War I was, in the words of T.E. Lawrence, "a sideshow of a sideshow." The Western combatants paid scant attention to the Middle Eastern theater, and as a result, the conflict was largely shaped by a small handful of adventurers and low-level officers, including German agent Carl Prüfer, agronomist and Zionist Aaron Aaronsohn, and Yale family black sheep William Yale, secretly working for Standard Oil. At the center of it all was Lawrence, a British liaison battling both the enemy and his own government to bring about his vision for the Arab people. Following years of intensive primary research, war correspondent Scott Anderson's sweeping portrait of Lawrence's Arabia is incisive in its profiles and acidly critical of the destruction wrought by European colonial plots, still echoing in the modern Middle East.

"Lawrence of Arabia is said to have reinvented warfare, and Scott Anderson has now reinvented Lawrence. By placing him alongside the other adventurers and spies who roamed the Arabian war theater, Anderson brilliantly illuminates how the modern Middle East came to be. The research in this book is so daringly original, and the writing so spectacular, that it feels like I'm reading about the topic for the first time."Sebastian Junger